The Hotel New Hampshire

maids, and she had a perfectly bored, expressionless gaze that matched her dull employment. Her name was Elizabeth Something, but in the Village she was called Scurvy. She was the best actress ever to graduate from the West Village Workshop—she was the queen of the Washington Square Park performers. She could have taught scream therapy to a whole backyard full of moles; she could have taught the moles how to scream so loud that the worms would leap right out of the ground. She was what Susie called a number one first-class hysteric. “Nobody can do hysteria better than Scurvy,” Susie the bear had told us, and Lilly had written up a number one first-class hysteric role for her. Scurvy just sat in the suite, smoking a cigarette and looking as lifeless as a park bench bum.

I played around with the big barbell in the middle of the living room. Frank and Lilly had greased me all over; I was oily from head to toe and I smelled like a salad, but the oil made my muscles stand out in a special way. I was wearing this skimpy little thing called a singlet—it’s that old-fashioned-looking, one-piece-bathing-suit thing that wrestlers and weight lifters wear.

“Keep warm,” Lilly coached me, “keep lifting just enough to keep the veins standing out. When he walks in here, I want those veins popping right up there on the surface of your skin.”

“If he walks in here,” Frank fumed.

“He will,” Franny said, softly. “He’s very near,” she said, shutting her eyes. “I know he’s very near,” she repeated.

When the phone rang, everyone in the room jumped—everyone but Franny and the number one first-class hysteric named Scurvy; they didn’t flinch. Franny let the phone ring a little. Lilly came out of the bedroom, all neatly dressed in her nurse’s uniform; she nodded to Franny at about the fourth ring and Franny picked up the phone. She didn’t say anything.

“Hello?” Chipper Dove said. “Franny?” we heard him ask. Franny shivered, but Lilly kept nodding to her.

“Come up right away,” Franny whispered into the phone. “Come up while my nurse is still out!” she hissed. Then she hung up; she gagged, and for a moment I thought she’d have to go throw up in the bathroom again, but she held it in; she was okay.

Lilly adjusted the tight, gray, mousy little bun of a wig she wore. She looked like an old nurse in a home for dwarfs; the women from the West Village Workshop had made up Lilly’s face like a prune. She stepped into the closet that was nearest the main door to the suite and shut the door. When you were in the living room of the suite, it was easy to confuse the closet with the entrance and exit door.

Scurvy put a stack of clean linen on her arm and went outside the suite into the hall. “Between five and seven minutes after he gets inside,” I told her.

“I don’t need reminding,” she said, crossly. “I can listen outside the door for my cue,” she told me contemptuously. “I’m a fucking pro, you know.”

The West Village Workshop women had one thing in common, Susie had confided to me. They had all been raped.

I started lifting the weight. I did some fast lifting to pump the muscles full of blood. Susie the bear curled up at the foot of the couch farthest from Franny and pretended to go to sleep. She hid her paws and her muzzled snout; from the back she looked like a sleeping dog. The black woman named Ruthie—the huge woman who was Junior Jones’s clone—plopped down in the dead center of the couch, right next to Franny. When the hibernating bear began to snore, Frank took off the caftan and hung it on a doorknob—he now wore just the black leotard—and went into Lilly’s bedroom and put the music on. From the living room, you could see the bed through the bedroom’s open door. When the music started, Frank started dancing on the bed. The music had been Frank’s choice. Frank had no trouble making up his mind: he chose the mad scene from Donizetti’s Lucia.

I looked at Franny and saw some tears squeeze their way out of the pinholes the makeup women had given her for eyes; the tears made messy tracks through the makeup caked upon her face. Franny knotted her fingers in her lap, and I knocked lightly on the closet door and whispered to Lilly: “A masterpiece, Lilly,” I said. “It’s got all the indications of a masterpiece.”

“Just don’t blow your lines,” Lilly whispered.

When Chipper Dove knocked on the door, my bicepses were standing right up there—the way Lilly wanted them—and the forearms were looking pretty good. I had a little sweat running over the oil, and in the bedroom Lucia was beginning to scream. Frank was so incredibly awkward, leaping on the bed, that I almost couldn’t look at him.

“Come in!” Franny cried to Chipper Dove. When I saw the doorknob turn, I grabbed my side of the door and helped Chipper Dove inside—fast. I guess I snapped the door open a little harder than was necessary because Chipper Dove seemed to be propelled inside the room—on all fours. I hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the outside knob and closed the door behind him.

“Well, look who’s here,” Franny said, in her best ice-blue voice.

“Holy cow!” cried Frank, at full height above the bouncing bed.

I rolled the barbell against the door, but Chipper Dove stood up—fairly calmly. He had that smile that wouldn’t die; at least, it hadn’t died yet.

“What’s all this, Franny?” he asked her, casually, but Franny had come to the end of her lines. Franny’s part of the script was over with. (“Well, look who’s here.” That was all that was necessary for her to say.)

“We’re going to rape you,” I said to Chipper Dove.

“Hey, look,” Dove said. “That was never exactly what I’d call a rape,” he said. “I mean, you really liked me, Franny,” he said to her, but Franny wasn’t talking. “I’m sorry about the other guys, Franny,” Dove added, but Franny’s pinhole stare gave him nothing. “Shit!” said Dove, turning to me. “Who’s going to rape me?”

“Not me!” Frank screamed from the bedroom, bouncing higher and higher. “I like fucking mud puddles, myself. I do it all the time!”

Chipper Dove still managed a smile. “So it’s the one on the couch?” he asked me, slyly. He stared at big Ruthie; he must have been remembering Junior Jones when he looked at her—she just stared back at him—but Chipper Dove even managed to smirk at her. “I have nothing against black women,” Chipper Dove said, dividing his attention between Ruthie and me. “In fact, I like a black woman now and then.” Ruthie raised up one cheek of her enormous ass and farted.

“You ain’t fucking me,” she told Chipper Dove.

Dove directed his full attention to me. Almost all of his smile had left him, because I think he was beginning to suspect that I was the one appointed to rape him and he wasn’t so fond of this idea.

“No, it’s not him, you asshole!” Frank yelled from the bedroom, panting and leaping-higher and higher. “He likes girls, like you do!” Frank yelled at Dove. “Disgusting, disgusting, disgusting girls!” Frank hollered. He fell off the bed, but he was right back up and dancing, fiercely. Lucia was really sounding crazy.

“Are you trying to tell me it’s the dog?” Chipper Dove asked me. “Do you think I’ll hold still for a fucking dog!” he snapped at me.

“What dog, man?” Ruthie asked Chipper Dove. Ruthie had a smile that was as terrible as Chipper Dove’s.

“That dog right there,” Dove said, pointing to Susie the bear. Susie was curled up in a ball, snoring, her hairy back turned to Dove—her paws tucked in, her head tucked down. Ruthie stuck her big bare foot in Susie’s crotch; she started kneading Susie with her foot. Susie started to groan.

“That ain’t no dog, man,” Ruthie said, smiling—and obscenely kneading, kneading with her foot. Then Ruthie twisted her foot, sharply, in Susie’s crotch and Susie the bear roared awake; she wheeled viciously on Ruthie, snapping at her. Dove saw the muzzle barely restraining her, he saw Ruthie bound out of the way of the long, striking claws. Ruthie threw the leash in Susie’s face and ran to the far side of the room. Susie looked ready to charge after her, but Franny just reached out her hand. She touched Susie just once and Susie calmed right down. The bear put her head in Franny’s lap. Susie growled softly there.

“Earl! Earl!” she moaned.

“That’s a bear,” Dove said.

“You bet your ass, man,” Ruthie said.

And Frank, sailing even higher, singing his way into Lucia’s song—and, seemingly, rising above even